If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?

[dunklea]

I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?

[Todd_McDonald]

Personally, if they don't provide value for someone searching, I'd leave them noindexed. No reason to run the risk of an algo adjustment because of thin content. Duplicate content is mostly an issue because it makes it hard for search engines to determine which version to rank.

[dunklea]

Understood -- however, 1. It provides value and matches common user queries (i.e. "University of Michigan study abroad program reviews -- just made that exact query up though) 2. It's not lean content; we only think about indexing these pages when there are enough in-depth reviews (i.e paragraphs not a line or two). 3. I totally understand that that's usually the problem with duplicate content, but our competitors are ranking for these because we're being cautious of potential future algo updates and they're not -- so regardless of the fact that we're putting the content up first, they're getting the points.

My question is more along the lines of: is review content / user generated content treated differently than you traditional duplicate blog post? Is it OK if we index this page with reviews even though our competitor has already done so?

[Todd_McDonald]

Hey Mitch,

Thanks for the clarification--I think I understand your situation a little better now. Let me ask you this, are the pages your reviews sit on significantly different than the pages with the same reviews that your competitors have? Meaning, is the only cross-over the review portion of the content?

To answer your adjusted question, I would personally say no--review content is not different than any other type of content that could be construed as duplicate. I am wondering if you could solve your issue by differentiating the pages you have with reviews that match your competitors by adding other types of content to them. This might help add valuable context for a search engine as well as differentiate the page enough to help an engine sort out that they are different even though there is some content overlap. Just a thought.

My other thought on this is that maybe it's worth setting up a test? This is certainly a gray area and there are probably people who would have differing opinions from mine, so perhaps a good next step is planning and working on a test to see what happens with a small portion of pages?

If the content isn't thin, it sounds like you shouldn't have an issue with an algo like panda, so I don't see a huge risk in the test from what I understand of your situation.

If I've got your site right, I'm guessing you're asking about pages like this: http://www.gooverseas.com/study-abroad/austria/ies-abroad/47342 and whether or not you'd allow them to be indexed because the reviews at the bottom might be on other review sites. Again, if the content on the rest of the page is significant and not the same as what's on other similar pages, I wouldn't worry to much about it. If it is, I'd run a test and see what you can do.

Without doing more research, that's the best I can offer at this point!

Oh, and you might want to look into this (2 of many)...

• http://www.gooverseas.com/leave-a-review?page=589
• http://www.gooverseas.com/leave-a-review?page=2

That does look like something that would get you hit by panda.

Hope that helps and sorry if I'm still not understanding the question correctly.

[MattRoney]

Did that help, Mitch?

[dunklea]

Really helpful thoughts all around. Sounds like we might continue to no-index the content for now (we assume that the descriptions of the programs are duplicate, since there's no way for us to efficiently check if people uploading program listings are just copy-pasting from their website -- reviews usually are the unique piece of content that allows us to move a page from noindexed to indexed).

Also, thanks for bringing the leave-a-review URLs to our attention -- I'll bring it up with my team this week!

Thanks again, Todd!

[dunklea]

Definitely -- would still be nice to hear another opinion or two, but Todd was very specific and thorough. I've got some great, actionable takeaways from this conversation.

[Todd_McDonald]

You bet Mitch! Glad to help and let me know if there's anything else I can help answer. Hopefully maybe you'll get a few other opinions as well. As I'm sure you know, that's often valuable in search with so many nuances to the SEO game.

Good luck with your search efforts!